​Unattended Vietnamese babies move at their peril

Friday, March 16, 2018, 20:00 GMT+7

Vietnamese social media channels have been roamed with videos capturing a kid standing on the window frame of a room on the high floor of an apartment building, and a baby unwittingly crawling across a main road with fast-moving traffic.

The first video, over two minutes long, was published Monday in the Facebook group named ‘Khang Gia Go Vap,’ accompanied by the comment: “Mom, where are you?”

A small child aged about three stepped with difficulty over the low horizontal bar across the window of its room on the 11th story of the Khang Gia condominium in Go Vap District, Ho Chi Minh City.

“Get in. Get in,” cried a female witness from the opposite building but to no avail.

After a while, two men from an adjacent room came to keep steady the child, who continued to climb through the window and moved along it before a person in the baby’s room carried him inside.

A child climbs through a window of the Khang Gia condominium in Go Vap District, Ho Chi Minh City in a video posted March 12, 2018 by the Facebook group of Khang Gia Go Vap

The video was widely shared online, with some viewers commenting that it must have been due to some table positioned near the window that the child was able to naively risk his life.

Inhabitants at a number of condominiums in Vietnam expressed their utter shock, asking their relatives living in such buildings to install a window railing as a precaution.

In another event on Tuesday, a baby was captured on the camera of a car while he was creeping on the portion of National Route 18 running through Cam Pha, a city in Quang Ninh Province, in northeastern Vietnam.

The car driver, Dang Dinh Thai, spotted what he described as a strange object and halted the vehicle in response, only to be astonished to see a baby, who had reached the median barrier.

“Looking at something moving at a distance, I thought it’s a running dog. I came nearer and my hair stood on end when I recognized that was a baby about eight months old, with his clothes covered in dust,” he said.

The kid’s mother scrambled to the scene and carried him to her house, which is located near one side of the road and whose door was left ajar at the time.

The mother failed to see the child since she was selling goods on the other side, with her view obstructed by the barrier.

A baby crawls on the part of National Route 18 crossing Cam Pha City, Quang Ninh Province, northern Vietnam, on the afternoon of March 13, 2018, in a video provided by Dang Dinh Thai.

These incidents resulted in no casualties but the case of an unminded three-year-old boy in Nam Dinh Province, a coastal region of northern Vietnam, is different.

On March 9, he took the elevator to the 21st floor of a kindergarten building alone, walked down the stairs to the immediately lower floor, where he climbed through the window, fell to the sixth floor and died.

Many sewers along the streets in Ho Chi Minh City have their entrances blocked by garbage on a regular basis, negatively impacting urban esthetics and the environment while helping cause serious flooding.

Despite the sweltering weather in Hanoi these days, many young people still flock to lotus ponds surrounding the capital city’s iconic Ho Tay (West Lake) to pose for Instgram-ready photos with a sea of blooming flowers.